I don't condone Apple's tax-avoidance schemes, but the company is hardly alone in taking advantage of loopholes in U.S and Irish tax law. The Wikipedia page that details the two key strategies employed by Apple, the Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich, lists 12 other major U.S. corporations that are pulling the same flim-flam. Among them are Apple's tech sector colleagues -- Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook and Adobe Systems -- along with General Electric, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Starbucks.

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As many on Twitter have been quick to note (some in total disbelief, mind you), Paul is the very littlest bit right in his outrage: Apple isn't breaking any laws by sheltering a portion of its earnings in three empty subsidiaries in Ireland, a strategy that has allowed the company to dodge billions in corporate taxes since 2009.

If Congress is looking to place blame for Apple's legal maneuvering, Rand said, they should look in the mirror:

If anyone should be on trial here, it should be Congress. I frankly think the committee should apologize to Apple. The Congress should be on trial here for creating a Byzantine and bizarre tax code.

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One thing to keep in mind is that the president and his staff have literally thousands of posts to fill. A White House that doesn’t want to get bogged down will defer many of these lower-level appointments to politicians in his party who have some special interest or expertise in a position. The IRS commissioner is usually seen as a low-level position, since the commissioner merely enforces the law and has no ability to actually make law.

When it came time to replace the retiring IRS commissioner in 2007, Senator Charles Grassley, ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, offered up one of his senior staffers on the committee by the name of Dean Zerbe.

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We at GlobalPost live by a third certainty: The world is a weird and wondrous place. However, we didn't realize until recently how much the promises of weirdness and taxes overlap.

From extra charges on flavored vodka in the US to beards in Russia, here are the top six wackiest taxes we've found around the world:

1. Tax on smartphones and laptops in France

French President Francois Hollande is considering a tax on smartphones, laptops and tablets to finance the country's celebrated exception culturelle, or "cultural exception," a precious French principle enshrined in law.

The exception essentially requires that anything considered to be of cultural value to French society must be protected from erratic market forces and the pernicious spread of non-French cultural items — namely, American and other English-language influences.

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The bill aims to "prevent discriminatory misconduct against taxpayers by Federal officers and employees" by making it a crime to scrutinize individuals or groups based on political beliefs or political expressions. Under the bill, the penalties would be a $5000 fine, up to five years in prison, or both.

IRS employees are already banned from this type of discrimination, but, at worst, they can only be fired.

“Americans of all political beliefs have been rightly outraged by the revelation of the IRS’ efforts to target certain political organizations," Turner said in a statement. "The fact that this could occur with little to no corrective action against those who seek to silence their fellow citizens is unacceptable. That’s why I’m taking immediate action and introducing this bill."

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In a statement earlier Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that the President "is concerned that the conduct of a small number of Internal Revenue Service employees may have fallen short" of the Administration's standard of conduct, and that if any rules were broken, Obama "expects that swift and appropriate steps will be taken to address any misconduct.”

From earlier:

An inspector general's audit of the IRS, set to be released this week, will reportedly show that the agency targeted a wider range of conservative groups than just those with "tea party" and "patriot" in the name, including groups that were generally critical of the government.

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Taking this step depends on two men: President Obama and Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Both men want to leave an important legacy, and both are in a unique political position: they still possess real political power, but neither will ever face another election. (Obama, of course, is limited to two terms, and Baucus has just announced that he will retire.) Acting together, the two of them could completely change the odds of enacting a carbon tax this year.

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Up until today, you might have been able to write all that anti-democratic pathology off as one infecting only the Republican Party's politicians and institutional leadership, but not its rank-and-file voters. But then this morning Fairleigh Dickinson University released this gun control-related pollshowing that authoritarianism runs throughout the the entire party.

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The late filing penalty is usually 5 percent of the unpaid taxes for each month — or part of a month — a return is late. That can add up quickly if you owe additional taxes. But what if the unpaid taxes are zero? Five percent of zero is ... zero!

However, if you wait more than three years to file, you forfeit your refund. So maybe it's better to file by Monday, after all. Besides, if you're getting a refund, why wait?

The IRS got a late start on tax season this year, thanks to a last-minute tax law passed by Congress on Jan. 1. But the deadline for filing returns didn't change, so if you owe money, it's time to settle up with the government.

In all, the IRS expects to process 149 million returns from individuals this year, including returns from people who file for 6-month extensions. About a quarter of returns are usually filed in the last three weeks before Tax Day. This year the IRS received more than 10 million electronically filed returns from Friday through Sunday.

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Last year, the ACLU sent a FOIA request to the IRS seeking records regarding whether it gets a warrant before reading people’s email, text messages and other private electronic communications. The IRS has now responded by sending us 247 pages of records describing the policies and practices of its criminal investigative arm when seeking the contents of emails and other electronic communications.

So does the IRS always get a warrant? Unfortunately, while the documents we have obtained do not answer this question point blank, they suggest otherwise. This question is too important for the IRS not to be completely forthright with the American public. The IRS should tell the public whether it always gets a warrant to access email and other private communications in the course of criminal investigations. And if the agency does not get a warrant, it should change its policy to always require one.

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“You can’t crowdfund without a crowd, and you can’t start a project from scratch and get people interested in it. You need to have some degree of reach and some small starting point. You need someone to send that link to.”

Since launching in 2009, Kickstarter has gone from a last-ditch resort to the method of choice for artists looking to fund their next creative endeavor. The platform has revolutionized the entertainment industry, allowing artists to turn directly to their online audience for financial support and, in doing so, freeing them from the pressure and restraints often associated with major-label contracts. In the last two years alone, more than $55 million has been raised for roughly 8,000 music-related projects.

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The House-Senate committee, which will introduce a bill this week drafted from the 58 recommendations that the pot task force issued last month with taxes being one of several issues the committee is considering, would ask voters to approve a 15 percent excise tax and a 15 percent special sales tax. Those rates plus existing local and state tax rates -- for food and beverage sales in Denver, the the combined total tax rate is 8 percent -- could mean a total tax rate 0f 38 percent on marijuana purchases in the Denver area.

Currently, medical marijuana is taxed like all food and beverage sales are and fluctuates from county to county, in Denver that rate is just 8 percent.

The proposed Colorado taxes are markedly higher than the taxes placed on recreational marijuana in the only other legalization state -- Washington. At present, Washington state's Initiative 502 legalized small amounts of marijuana and marijuana products for people 21 and older and established a 25 percent excise tax on those products.

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Though I name names in recent testimony on the topic, I’m sympathetic.  Your loophole is my treasured job-creation program without which the economy will collapse.

So we need some criteria by which to judge what should stay and what should go.  In the link above, I argue for a 3-step test involving revenue forgone, efficiency, and fairness.  Someone suggested adding political feasibility, which makes sense, though given the state of Congressional gridlock, that could shut down the whole enterprise.

Anyway, these thoughts came to mind when I saw the graph below from my CBPP colleague Will Fischer (here’s the post from which I plucked it).  It’s about the mortgage interest deduction (MID), and to my eyes, it’s a picture of an expensive, inefficient, and unfair tax break.

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Last week, AlterNet caught up with Johnston by phone. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.

Joshua Holland: David, for years you’ve reported how those who can afford the right accountants game this labyrinthian and opaque tax-code of ours. How surreal has it been for you to observe the amount of political conflict we've faced over the past few years over returning the top marginal rates to the same rate they were during the Clinton era -- taking them from 35 percent to 39 percent?

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This story was co-produced with NPR.

Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes — and for free. You'd open up a pre-filled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone.

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Today America’s powerful rentier interests, particularly those in the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector, are mobilizing campaign contributions and paid propaganda to promote what I called the Rentier Agenda: low taxes on those whose income is derived from capital gains; the privatization of public infrastructure and the deregulation of regulated private utilities, to generate windfall profits for investors in privatized or deregulated agencies; and a macroeconomic policy that serves the interests of creditors, at the expense of slow growth and mass unemployment, rather than productive businesses and workers. Similar observations have been made by many on the left and some mavericks on the right.

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In American politics as in the American economy, power and wealth have shifted from the industrial capitalists of old to the “rent lords” of the early 21st century, based in the overgrown FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector. The agenda of the new rentier oligarchy in the U.S. is quite different from that of traditional productive businesses. The Rentier Agenda consists of low taxes on rentiers, the privatization of infrastructure and social insurance, and a macroeconomic policy that favors creditors rather than debtors, including debtor businesses and debtor governments.

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At the rank-and-file voter level, this is, of course, a cartoon version of ideologies; many self-described liberals are hardly dreaming of turning America into a giant kibbutz while many self-described conservatives just want the government out of their face. However, at the elected official level in Washington, the conservative cartoon in particular is no comedic caricature: As Rep. Paul Ryan's new House Republican budget shows, it is an actual worldview, with specific legislative proposals in tow.

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A central reason we’re heading into the self-inflicted wound known as sequestration is because R’s refuse to budge on any new revenues in a deficit reduction deal to offset the $85 billion in auto-cuts about to hit our already wobbly economy.  The problem, they say, is on the spending side, not the revenue side.  D’s insist on balance—the solution must include both spending cuts and revenue increases, they maintain.

But what if I offered you–them–a solution that scratched both of those itches at once…a way to simultaneously both cut spending and raise revenues?  That would be irresistible, right?

Well, I’ve got exactly that.  I’m working up testimony on this for the Senate next week but the solution is so damn compelling—and the sequestration deadline only hours away—it would be downright unpatriotic to keep it to myself a second longer.

So, are you ready?

It’s tax expenditures!

Wait a minute…where’re you going?  Get back here right now!  I’m telling you, this should work.

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